the twilight of the tweets, and links

I do use Twitter but I’m increasingly bored with it. I suspect all of us are going to float through various social media sites and settle on a few favorites for various reasons: our friends/family/colleagues use it, we like the way it works, etc. All of these forms probably will experience a peak at some point (surely Twitter’s close to its peak) and valleys as they fade away – think Friendster, think MySpace. The only one that might have staying power – in my opinion – is Facebook, simply because it is rapidly becoming an entire internet within itself; I know plenty of people to whom "online" means "on Facebook" and little else, except maybe YouTube (embeddable within Facebook) or other media sites.

It doesn’t really matter what you use, as long as you enjoy it. I feel an obligation to keep up with Twitter since so many other bloggers do, but I’ll confess that I usually only read other people’s tweets for 5 minutes or less per day – it’s just not a medium that appeals to me.

On to the links:

Prioritizing Your To-Do List: Getting the Right Things Done: In my eternal quest for a perfect to-do system I think I may finally have hit upon my gold standard. I keep an index card and a small pen in my pocket all day and write my to-dos down. In the evening I put them in Google Calendar if they are time-sensitive and a text file if not, without dates, just a list. So far, seems to be working well.

Save with Smart Meters and Appliance Timers: This is on my short list – I need to get more timers to shut off things at night. You might say I could do that manually, but really, who wants to have to go around the house turning off every single power strip… and I just made myself sound really lazy. Nice.

How I Tweet: I admire Guy, although I’m not a close follower of his work. I will say he’s awesome at responding – we’ve traded a few emails and he responds instantly, all the time. I think he shows where twitter is going: he doesn’t read anyone else’s tweets, just replies and direct messages. Almost defeats the purpose, I guess, but he’s probably more productive than he would be if he attempted to keep up with thousands of people.

The 2010 Tax Deductions You Can’t Claim: Good to know that unemployment benefits – basically a repayment of the (taxed) money you already paid into the system with your unemployment insurance taxes – are going to be fully taxed this year, while the top tax bracket didn’t.

When was the last time you bought a tie?: When I bought a tie? A decade ago, I bet. Bubelah’s bought me a couple as gifts over the years, but even as a gift I don’t think I’ve received one in at least three years or so.